BOOM workshop

(Chelsea teaching, Cooper standing awkwardly behind her :P )

You may remember last year for Cornell's annual Bits On Our Mind (BOOM) I had an ambisonic music environment project on display and also gave a presentation on procedural generation.

This year I helped teach a 4 hour workshop on game design as part of the CIS High School Outreach Program... reminiscent of the 10 week program I helped teach last semester. Of course it's pretty hard to make a full fledged game in 4 hours, so we fell back to paper prototyping.

More and more this year I am learning about the importance of the iterative prototype, and how incredibly cost effective they can be. Just for clarity, I did resolve to make 5 games or game prototypes this year, so I suppose some of those could very well be nontechnical prototypes. (If you're curious, I'm working on 2 games right now that I'm sure will be featured in upcoming posts)

At any rate, the workshop went surprisingly well, and the CS department will be using the workshop to ask for more funds from NYSTAR; so win. While teaching game design was a great part time job, I wouldn't want to make a career out of teaching: it gives me stress headaches.